1797 Workhouse Diet Days 3 & 4: Pease Porridge Hot

Day 3 Stodge-ometer rating: 7/10

Day 4 Stodge-ometer rating: 3/10

Day three fell on a Monday. My breakfast was this again:

I was delivering training to volunteers at the Ancient House Museum in Thetford, and I had to drive there, so I decided to save my beer until later.

My ten-year old son was concerned at this change to the diet. 
"Will you get told off?" he whispered. 
Well, of course, I won't, but the inmates would definitely have been reprimanded for any such behaviour.

Lunch was Pease Pottage. My second attempt was more edible than my first. There's a video on The Workhouse Diet YouTube channel here of me eating it. It looks (and tasted) like something paleolithic from the ocean floor.

Supper was, inevitably, more of this:

Day Three also brought some more publicity. Here's a link to EDP24 online coverage of the project, and as a taster, here's what appeared in the EDP paper itself:

Whoops, I got it confused with this...

I had more headaches on Day Three. I wondered if they were caused by the effort of digesting such a lot of stodge; my belly is, after all, more used to softer, modern foods, and fruit and vegetables.

I haven't felt hungry at all. But I have no doubt that if I were doing the same amount of physical labour as 'Betty Workhouse', I would have felt fairly peckish as the next mealtime approached .

Day Four's diet will be the same as Day Two's, except for supper, which is 'broth and bread' (i.e. the water the meat was cooked in on Sunday). The broth was reasonably tasty, and it was a nice change to have something lighter.

And then there was the inevitable rye bread. Variety is not, it seems, the spice of workhouse life!